By Jody Sackett
Imagine that HGTV calls to feature your holiday-decorated home on its network. How thrilling! But there is a tiny catch – to keep up with the times, all your decorations have to be sustainably sourced. To ordinary mortals this might be daunting; but you cheerfully accept the challenge.
You know living sustainably improves the quality of our lives, protects the planet and preserves natural resources for future generations. So you accomplish sustainable decorating by following a couple of ground rules: upcycling stuff you already have, utilizing sustainable materials, avoiding persistent plastics, and mindfully choosing quality over quantity. You also use edible yard decorations to help local wildlife.
The result? Your home is camera-ready and earth-friendly.
A Natural Noel
Gathering fresh pine, cedar, boxwood and holly branches from your yard and displaying them in glass vases with locally found pinecones, hand-picked gray cedar berries, or pretty shells to anchor the bottom is another good option. Pro tip: Wet sand helps keep those cut boughs green longer.
Homemade dried clementines are the perfect bouquet accent. Start by first thinly slicing the fruits and then drying the slices for a few hours in the oven on low heat. So lovely and they can be reused for years to come. Placed thoughtfully around the house, these natural bouquets also emitted a subtle holiday fragrance.
Speaking of fragrance, don’t just decorate by sight and sound: Bump up the holiday excitement with an olfactory welcome for all your guests by creating a simple stovetop potpourri. Simmering water with apple peels and orange slices and spices like cloves, cinnamon sticks and nutmeg.
And if you have a Christmas cactus it should be blooming right about now (hence the name), so it can take center stage on the mantle or table – so natural and eco-friendly.
Finally, don’t forget about the outdoors when decorating. Make wildlife-friendly backyard decorations: a symphony of kid-made classic peanut butter-and-birdseed covered pinecones tied with colorful ribbons (yep, recycled again) onto bare tree branches, interwoven with strings of leftover Thanksgiving cranberries. No food waste here!
Homemade Keepsakes
It’s better to use a few high-quality, memorable pieces than to flood the place with tons of decorations made from everlasting plastic. Setting out cherished family decorations that are reused generation after generation, each with a story, is more meaningful than impulse-buying cheap discardable trinkets.
If you want to craft keepsakes with your children that will be treasured for years, enter the world of homemade dough. Cinnamon dough (1 ½ cups applesauce to 2 cups cinnamon), is super-easy to make and retains its sweet scent for years; flatten the dough to about a ¼ inch thick and use cookie cutters to make holiday ornament shapes; let dry on a cookie sheet for three to four days, depending on the thickness. Cut out a dog bone shape to inscribe with your pet’s name and the date.
You can immortalize children’s handprints – and pets’ paw prints – in a simple sand clay made of sand, flour, salt and water. Kids can’t resist glitter flourishes, but make sure to buy biodegradable glitter; made from eucalyptus trees it naturally decomposes.
Let There Be Light
Both Hanukkah and Christmas shine with lovely lights, so make your own candleholders by transforming old mason and jelly jars into luminaria. Since we live by the coast, it’s easy to put sand in the bottom of each jar to hold tealights or votive candles. Add a few beach shells and stones scavenged during memorable walks. For color, tie bright raffia or recycled ribbons (save ribbons all year long, they’re so useful) around the jars, along with a sprig of holly from the yard, and voilà, beautiful, reusable candleholders.
For extra personalization, have the kids draw on the glass with colored Sharpies, making “place-card-jars” for Hanukkah or Christmas dinners. Protected inside the jar on a porch, these candles are also radiant beacons of light even on windy nights.
Knowing that LED lights use 75% less energy than incandescent ones, choose those when replacing or buying new to decorate the outside of your house. “If you already still have lots of old-school lights that work, it’s better to continue using them, and avoid adding that to the landfill,” Peter Litwin, Oceanport Environmental Commissioner advises.
Do connect your lights to timers to automatically shut off at bedtime. That helps nocturnal wildlife navigate better, and honestly, who needs lights at 3 a.m.?
Green Traditions
Make a Grateful Tree to display what your family is grateful for this year. Spray paint a dry tree branch silver, stick in a vase of sand and make “leaves” out of construction paper to hang by twine from the branch. Have family members and holiday guests write what they are grateful for this season.
When the TV crew arrives they’ll be impressed beyond belief at how terrific your home looks – and smells – while still being sustainable. Congratulations on your outstanding environmental stewardship.
This article originally appeared in the November 30 – December 6, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
